Children and families hit hard by court delays in B.C.
“You take a ten year old, and a one-year delay is ten per cent of their life”
Underfunding of B.C.'s legal aid program means families are left to fend for themselves, clogging up the system and lowering the quality of justice, according to some B.C. lawyers.
"It's like going into a clinic and being your own doctor; it's ludicrous," criminal lawyer Richard Fowler told Michelle Eliot, host of CBC's B.C. Almanac.
Senate recommends changes
His comments come on the heels of a report released Monday by the Senate legal and constitutional affairs committee, which made 50 recommendations to reduce backlogs in court systems across the country.
Of those 50 recommendations, the committee identified 13 as priorities, including an increase in federal funding of legal aid to the provinces to reduce delays caused by unrepresented individuals navigating the courts without financial or legal supports.
The report outlines in detail how self-represented individuals slow the system and how judges have to "bend over backwards" to ensure those individuals receive a fair trial.
Self-representation can also lead to an increase in adjournments, stay of proceedings, wrongful convictions and the likelihood of a ruling being overturned, according to the report.
"It's the most vulnerable who get stuck in the system," said Mobina Jaffer, a B.C. based senator and former vice-chair of the committee.
Criminal vs. family
Jaffer said the bulk of legal aid funding in B.C. goes to criminal cases and what's left isn't enough to meet the demands of families, low-income earners or cases involving the Ministry of Children and Family Development.
In 2016, in B.C., 39 per cent of family cases were self-represented while the same applied to only 17 per cent of criminal cases, according to a report from the Provincial Court of B.C.
"Single mothers get the short end of the stick," Jaffer said.
B.C. has been successful in reducing wait times for criminal trials and was singled out in the senate report for reducing the number of impaired driving cases that end up in the court system after new impaired driving laws were introduced in 2010.
But Fowler said B.C. needs to keep its "foot on the gas pedal" where it has seen success, while also addressing the serious impacts of judicial wait times on children and families.
"You take a ten year old, and a one-year delay is ten per cent of their life," said Fowler.
Fowler and Jaffer both said the 13 priority recommendations made by the senate are essential to reducing wait times in all jurisdictions and they'd like to see fewer people with mental illness and addiction ending up in the courts.
You can hear the entire conversation on CBC Radio One's B.C. Alamanc here.